Beginning the world [Hardcover]

Karen Armstrong (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312071817
• ISBN-13: 978-0312071813
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs-including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation-and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hardest Journey is After Leaving, January 15, 2003

By 

Diane Lucy Thatcher (Derry, NH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning the world (Hardcover)

I got this book to see if Karen Armstrong faced many of the same obstacles I did after leaving the convent's "protected" enviroment. The book was engrossing and in many ways close to my experiences after leaving. I had to laugh as we both faced the drafty mini-skirt experience and relief when skirts lengthened. But that adjustment to secular dress is minor to the real adjustments to the secular world.

The hardest journey is the slow and painful shedding of convent life and not recreating it in the new world entered. Like her I stayed in the academic world and recreated a convent life by attending a woman's college. She studied literature, I studied religion. She lived with a special needs child and I taught in a special needs program. The similarities were so shocking as I read I both had to put the book down and pick it upagain. I could not let go of the book and the book of me. At times I felt we were in the same place but I was not as she was in a Roman Catholic convent in England and I was in an Anglican/Episcopalian convent in the United States.

We both shared the convent's abuse rooted in a life of emotional repression as best described by one of her superior's as well as mine. "Feelings do not count." Even our abuse had similarities and life long consequences.. that is why the hardest journey is after leaving. The convent veils had to be cut,torn, penetrated and sugically removed to enter life, human life.

Thank God, we both did.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sequel of "Through the Narrow Gate", January 19, 2004

By 

G. Anderson (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning the world (Hardcover)

I have a great debt to Ms. Armstrong for her writing this book. I was astounded how my cult experience in Jehovah's Witnesses was parallel to that of a Catholic nun: living in a closed religious group and suddenly being out in a world we did not know how to live in. The book details Ms. Armstrong's struggles to adjust in "the real world" and move forward. She opens even the most personal details of her life for you to know as she pours out her story in vivid detail. To have gone from a desperate woman who seriously attempted suicide to a successful best-selling author has been a pleasure to see. Her books "A History of God" and "The Battle for God" along with her excellent "Buddha" helped free me from the clutches of fundamentalism. Thank you, Karen. I look forward to reading the updated version of this book, "The Spiral Staircase."

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Memoir, August 10, 2007

By 

Susan DeVore "crazy4nuns" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning the world (Hardcover)

"Beginning the World" was written by a former nun and this is the memoir of her painful, but triumphant, journey into secular life. In this 243-page hard bound book, Ms Armstrong presents the fascinating account of her life after leaving the convent ~~ the story of a young woman of 24 years who was totally unprepared for the shock of confronting the real world. Writing with both sensitivity and humor, she describes the agonies of adjustment to a world in which people touched each other ~~ laughed, drank wine ..... made love. She tells of the painful realization that her body and even her mind were resisting the changes she was imposing upon them ~~ to the point that she began to doubt her sanity. But ~~ she also writes of the tenderness of friendship and the awakening of passion .... the growing understanding that the soul could not be saved at the expense of the body. It has been said that Karen Armstrong faced many of the same obstacles faced by other former nuns after leaving the convent's "protected" enviroment. The hardest journey was the slow and painful shedding of convent life and in not recreating it in the new world entered. "Beginning the World" has been praised by many former nuns who have called it "..... emotive, spiritually intimate and often a quite moving memoir ...", "..... Her (Karen Armstrong's) book has the fascination of any DETAILED descripiton of an unknown world ...". Ultimately, this is the story of a woman's growing awareness of the possibilities that life offers ~~ a triumph neither of flesh nor spirit alone, but of humanity.